Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday September 18, 2013 @11:01PM
from the horseshoes-and-hand-grenades dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From the Register, "Multiple NASA websites were defaced last week by a Brazilian hacktivist who may have misread the sites' URLs, because he wasn't protesting about the US space agency giving joyrides to inhuman stowaways – he was protesting against NSA spying. 'BMPoC' hit kepler.arc.nasa.gov and 13 other sites with messages protesting against US spying on Brazil, as well as a possible US military intervention in Syria. It's hard to believe anyone would confuse the NSA spy agency with NASA, the space agency, except for satirical purposes or to mock script kiddies in some way, so we can only guess that the hackers behind the attack hit NASA because it's a US government agency whose systems are noted for being insecure.""

The dimensions of the Space Shuttle were specifically designed to carry large spy satellites. Many early scientific missions were spy missions in disguise. So NASA has been in bed with the intelligence complex for quite some time.

Most satellites have vaguely the same dimensions. A shuttle that "carries satellites" carries most kinds of satellites. Also, most of them are put into orbit by conventional rockets, rather than the shuttle.

Since you didn't work it out from the above posters post I'll try to make it a bit clearer. The cargo bay is not the issue but instead all the extra fuel capacity that enabled the shuttle to get into polar orbits for military missions. That's what made the shuttle a collection of stuff tied together proving anything can fly if given enough of a push instead of the earlier designs of an orbiter sitting neatly on top of a well designed collection of rockets.

The 'convergence or confluence' theory was confirmed later in the day by a former spacecraft designer, who declined to be named but is familiar with both programs, who confided unequivocally: "The space shuttle's payload bay was sized to accommodate the KH-9."

Hubble fit in the space shuttle, and Hubble by most accounts is a KH-11 (with some modifications for astronomical purposes).

Regardless, US military satellites are launched using regular rockets (Titan IV, Delta IV, those kinds of launcher). It's a lot cheaper for basic satellite insertion (not to say the Shuttle didn't have some military purposes, at least in it's design, just that they are not spy satellite launching).

The Misty satellite is believed to have been derived from the KH-11, but modified to make it invisible to radar, and hard to detect visually. The first Misty satellite, USA-53, was released by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-36. The satellites are sometimes identified as KH-12s.

The US intelligence community is fairly compartmentalized in to a bunch of agencies that do different things. For satellites, it's the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office. The NSA is signals intelligence, intercepting phone calls, radio communications, e-mail, that kind of thing. Hence all the stuff that has leaked about what they've been doing.

Also NASA (in tandem with NOAA and the USGS) operates a number of Earth facing sats like the Landsat series. They aren't all that high resolution, lower resolution than the stuff you see on Google Earth, since they are for monitoring things like vegetation index and so on. The newest one, Landsat 8, has some pretty badass multi-spectral sensors.

It's hard to believe anyone would confuse the NSA spy agency with NASA, the space agency

Either the author has had zero contact with Average Joe, or he is seriously overestimating the IQ of the general populous. There's only a single letter of difference between the two acronyms; they can easily be confused with each other by anyone unfamiliar with either of the two agencies.

Add to that the fact that the the hacker was Brazilian and probably didn't speak English as his first language, I would see this as being extremely plausible.

NASA is quite known, and NSA has been in the news for quite some time; one with technical skill enough to deface a website would at least have a good enough education to know the difference between both, regardless of English knowledge.

I bet the defacer was either thinking "if I can't deface NSA, I'll deface NASA to send my message regardless" or drunk.

Whilst I would expect someone involved enough to start hacking their servers would be better informed, the general population are *very* uninformed about foreign politics. Forgiveable given the local politics mirrors a soap opera.

I made reference to the NSA & recent events during a meeting at a state department here & only one person in the room had any clue what I was talking about.

Like NSA spying, the hacker just caught some "innocent bystanders" by accident. It wasn't illegal hacking, just an honest mistake. Just like the NSA collecting information on innocent people while claiming to target terrorists.

So, they attacked a different department of the same entity (The US government).

That's not that big of a mistake. Imagine if someone chose to embargo the entire country of Cuba, just because they didn't like the Cuban government. Now that would be a much bigger mistake, than attacking a part of the US government because the US government is trying really hard to stop the "But we are still better than North Korea" excuse.

What few people realize is that Brazil is a quite popular destination for our friends visiting from the arid climes of the red planet next door. What with the Amazon - world's largest river - , the Atlantic Ocean and the/rain/ forest, they are quite in love with that nation's water-rich climate. So many Martians visit Brazil and more than a few have learned the language. It's a known fact: Martians love Brazil.

But - as Earthlings have a problem with the NSA spying on them - so Martians take issue with NASA. Giant telescopes in the sky watching everything they do, immense electronic ears eavesdropping on the universe, and robotic drones pushing their telescoping probes into unwanted places; there is increasing upset with NASA's activities amongst non-terrestrials. Oh sure, NASA says it is "for the science" but it's a government agency (worse, an/American/ government agency; the US's reputation has spread even to the stars); when have they ever told the whole truth about their motives?

This isn't, of course, the first time that Martian hackers have expressed their displeasure; one need only remember the Denial of Service attack on the Beagle 2 lander (although this was of course never admitted by NASA officials, preferring to blame the loss on "technical failures"). And one need only visit the Chryse Planitia to see all the graffiti sprayed on the Viking 1 lander espousing their dissatisfaction with NASA policies*.

So this was no "confused Brazilian" who targeted the wrong website; this was a calculated statement made by an extra-terrestrial warning that the tempers are flaring regarding the recent actions of the American space agency. It was not the first such warning and surely will not be the last. The only unusual part of this story is that the "hacktivist" in question performed his vandalism while on his vacation. And that he had three tentacles, was green and had antennae.

Don't let the mainstream media blind you to the truth! Reign in NASA before it leads us to interplanetary conflict!